Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie #bookreview #series

I purchased this book for my own collection.

Publisher: William Morrow

Published: April 17, 2012 (first published 1929)

Summary:

Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are Partners in Crime—or rather partners in crime solving—and must demonstrate their deductive skills in a wide range of confounding cases after agreeing to take over Blunt’s International Detective Agency.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are restless for adventure, so when they are asked to take over Blunt’s International Detective Agency, they leap at the chance.

Their first case is a success—the triumphant recovery of a pink pearl. Other cases soon follow—a stabbing on Sunningdale golf course; cryptic messages in the personal columns of newspapers; and even a box of poisoned chocolates. But can they live up to their slogan of “Any case solved in 24 hours”?

My thoughts:

Moving right along in the #ReadChristie2023 Challenge, I’m 2 for 2 this year! The prompt for February is use of a blunt object and the main selection is Partners in Crime. Like last month’s selection, this happened to be a book I hadn’t read yet, so I went with it.

This is my first time reading Tommy and Tuppence and while I enjoyed my introduction to them, I have to say that overall, I didn’t love this book. It’s a collection of short stories and I didn’t find myself engaging with them as I usually do when I read an Agatha Christie book. Perhaps it was the way that Tommy and Tuppence go about solving the cases they are presented with – they tend to impersonate various other fictional detectives and so with each case, it was a different method of detective work. I’m not really sure what it was, but this one never quite grabbed me. Maybe it was that there were 15 short stories and some of them were so short that they seemed over before they even got going…and then others seemed exceptionally long.

I’m still glad I read this one and perhaps at some point I’ll start at the beginning of this series – this is the 2nd book – and maybe that will make a difference. I do enjoy Agatha’s writing – that is always a joy for me and I am determined to see this challenge to the end this year, so that is why I stuck with it to the end for this book.